Orphaned and raised apart, the two reunited in adulthood and roomed together in Baltimore, where Henry staggered from alcoholism into an early death at the age of twenty-four, in 1831. Typically going by the name Henry, he was a poet, like his famous sibling, and a hard-drinking sailor. They didn’t run with Edgar’s name, though, but under the initials W.H.P.-William Henry Leonard Poe.įew readers know that Edgar had an older brother. After Poe’s first poetry collection, “Tamerlane and Other Poems,” débuted in 1827-anonymously, and quite sensibly so, as the eighteen-year-old author was on the run from creditors-two of his poems (“ The Happiest Day” and “ Dreams”) reappeared that autumn in the North American, a short-lived weekly newspaper in Baltimore. Sometimes, as Edgar Allan Poe mused in “The Purloined Letter,” a secret hides in plain sight.
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